A balancing act of Asia's security concerns promises to be the region's biggest challenge as it moves into the next century, security experts said in Taipei yesterday.
"At the dawn of the new millennium, Asia and the Pacific is going through a critical period of transition. In fact it is at a cross-roads," said You Ji (
You and other international as well as local scholars delivered papers at a two-day 1999 Asia-Pacific Security Forum Conference in Taipei hosted by the Institute for National Policy Research.
Scholars said that security dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region were largely dependent on China's conduct, and particularly its relations with Taiwan.
"Now, in 1999, Taiwan is arguably the number one military flash point in the world, overtaking both the Middle East and North Asia," said William Triplett, former Chief Republican Counsel to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Triplett and colleague Edward Timperlake argue that China's People's Liberation Army's arms build-up is driven not by external forces but by internal dynamics and a "plan to reunify Taiwan with the mainland."
China's militarization effort has strengthened following the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, where the public's questioning of the Chinese Communist government's legitimacy reached a climax, Triplett wrote.
As China wages a battle for internal stability the rest of the region is at risk, the authors said.
Taiwan's Minister of Defense Tang Fei (
"The end of the Cold War and international confrontation did not alleviate security tensions in Asia as it did in Europe. Quite the contrary, military expenditure in the region has been on the rise along with economic growth while [military spending] in Europe has been descending," Tang said.
"The region lacks a mature collective security mechanism," Tang said, pointing out that while the Asian financial crisis had slowed regional defense spending, it had not halted it.
This lack of a mechanism is exacerbated by the uncertainty of what China's may do.
"Until China renounces the use of force against Taiwan, we cannot say China does not have any interest in war," said Admiral Richard Cobbold, Director of the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies.
Events in the region and across the globe also continue to add to the complexity of the regional security in Asia.
China's strong reaction a-gainst "humanitarian interven-tion" in Kosovo earlier this year clearly highlighted its fears of similar action by global powers in the event of a flare up in Tibet, Xinjiang or the Taiwan Strait, experts said.
"Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan all have potential to experience what happened in Yugoslavia and invoke outside interference," You said.
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